CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Letters From Latin America
Reviews of fiction by Mexican Brenda Navarro and Argentinean Claudia Pineiro and of poetry by Nicaraguan-Costa Rican Lester Gomez Medina
CAREFUL CRAFTSMAN: Nicaraguan-Costa Rican writer Lester Gomez Medina
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
EMPTY HOUSES (Daunt Books, £9.99), Mexican writer Brenda Navarro’s first novel, is the devastating story of a mother who loses her small child in a playground somewhere in Mexico and her relentless search to find him.
It is also the story of a working-class woman who has kidnapped the child in order to fulfil her maternal desires and, fittingly, the chapters begin with epigraphs from the work of Polish poet Wisława Szymborska that set the tone for what it is yet to come.
The narrative alternates between the harrowing stories of these two desperate woman as they try to make sense of motherhood, mental and physical abuse and trauma in a novel that questions maternal instincts in patriarchies and the place of women in modern society.
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CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin
A heatwave, a crimewave, and weird bollocks in Aberdeen, Indiana horror, and the end of the American Dream
MANJEET RIDON relishes a novel that explores the guilty repressions – and sexual awakenings – of a post-war Dutch bourgeois family